I first saw Sir, We Have an Orc Problem in a random review I clicked on browsing BlueSky last night. I can’t find that review anymore. However, that review plus seeing another friend playing it on Steam was enough make me buy a copy.
I am easily influenced.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem, which I’ll now be abbreviating to SWHOP to, to the determent of my SEO, is an incremental tower defense game. It’s $9, and it’s fairly short. It took me about six and a half hours to beat the whole thing, and do a bit of achievement hunting.
The loop is simple. Pick a map. Place towers. Start the map. Watch as orcs die. Did you kill them all before you ran out of lives? Great, you unlocked the next map. Did you fail to kill them all? Spend the currency you got to boost your towers.
This is the biggest difference between SWHOP and most other tower defense games I’ve played. There’s no in-round building, or economic management element. Instead, all of your available towers and their power is gated by an incremental game style tree.
There are three resources you use on the incremental tree, blue, red, and pink crystal. Red is used for unlocking new towers, and you earn it by beating new levels. Pink is generally used for unlocking large single upgrades for towers, and earned by beating levels without letting any mobs get through. Blue Crystal is used for everything else. Blue has 3-ish sources. First, lump sum bonuses for beating a level. Second, you can earn crystal by killing orcs. And third, there are unlocks that grant crystal at the end of finishing a level, based on the levels difficulty.
This brings me to my big “problem” with SWHOP. It has the systems and functionality for an incredible tower defense game, but the part of the tower defense gameplay loop that is satisfying is completely subsumed by the incremental game elements.
There are a few things that collide to make this true, so I’m going to try to pull them apart, and point out how they interlock to cause this problem.
First, it straight up isn’t possible to beat the game without using the incremental game upgrades. You can’t. Without those systems, you cannot place towers, and you’re expected to lose the first level at least a few times before you get enough upgrades to beat it.
Second, because this is the first lesson you learn as a player, its the easiest mindset to adopt going forward, and until the very last level of the game, you’ll be rewarded for it. While you could micromanage your tower placements, it’s easier to just buy more towers and bullet penetration until you can brute force your way through a level. It also makes it very hard to gauge why you’re failing a level. Was it poor tower placement? Or was it just because you’re not at the power level needed yet?
And gauging that power level is hard, because enemy health scales between levels. On level 1, Orcs have a maximum of 6.4 health. On level 12, they can have 625. Upgrades are necessary.
The end result is a loop that feels like it encourages you to turn off your brain a bit. My response to losing during a level wasn’t “Let me re-evaulate my placement”, it was “Lets just run it back so I can save up enough to get more penetration on my cannons.” It’s the zen of the incremental game instead of the planning of tower defense.
This strategy falls apart on the last level, which I’ll be honest, I had to go and look up a guide for, because after spending what felt like an hour on this one level, I was getting a bit grumpy. SWHOP doesn’t have infinite scaling, so once I’d bought all the upgrades, I was booted back into playing an actual tower defense, while having absorbed zero lessons about the nature of the game over the last 5 hours.
And it’s a shame because SWHOP does have what feels like a competent set of tower defense bones. Orcs move and flow in satisfying waves, towers feel physical in a fun way. Deploying towers and setting their line of fire is fun. And while I find the actual map designs a bit unsatisfying, their scale in parts of the end game is incredibly enjoyable. This doesn’t feel like an incremental game with another system bolted onto it, it feels like a tower defense game that got consumed by the nature of it’s upgrade system.
Side Note: I will say though, I don’t get the line of fire system in this game. The short version is that you can set up a cone, and all tower shots will be within that cone. The problem is that it’s always better to just keep your shots concentrated on a single choke point then to spray and pray, even with towers like the flamethrower.
Sir, We Have an Orc Problem gave me the mental feeling of scrolling on TikTok for five to six hours. It’s not really a bad feeling? But it’s not really a pleasant one either. This morning when I woke up, I’d actually forgotten that I’d played this game, despite having spent 6 hours on it yesterday.
If you know that you enjoy incremental games, and need one to play, this might be for you. Personally, the most value I’ve gotten out of this one is that it’s kicked me out of my funk of not getting any writeups finished.
I just wish I liked it better.